>>529953945
>Are you telling me I need to kill bandit camps to get copper tools? Really?
Not exactly, but yeah.
More accurately:
1) to allow your villagers to get copper, you need to liberate the region, which means building a monument (bridge, watch tower, or whatever else), and kill bandits. Once it's done, you unlock copper gathering.
2) I don't remember the exact condition, but to allow copper crafting, you need to level up, but I think it's also tied to how many regions are freed.

You can still drop copper tools and even repair them without having them unlocked, but yeah. Open the world map and see by yourself.